(JWR) --- (http://www.jewishworldreview.com)
THOSE OF US WHO ARE PESSIMISTIC about the decline of American standards and
apprehensive about the future of this country certainly had enough reasons
to become more pessimistic during 1998. W.H. Auden called the 1930s "a low,
dishonest decade." The year just past was perhaps the most low and dishonest
year in this century.

The most visible example was of course the White House scandals that led to
impeachment. But it was not just these scandals themselves. It was also
the army of White House liars deployed throughout the media around the
clock, day in and day out, in an unremitting campaign to confuse and
deceive.

It was the shrill and shameless lies of oily Ivy League law professors and
the double-talk of feminists who used to go ballistic over little remarks
that pale in comparison with Bill Clinton's behavior. Perhaps more than
anything else, 1998 was the year when everyone who brought the truth about
this scandal was targeted for organized and sustained character
assassination, while the biggest liar of them all ended up high in the
public opinion polls.

Fortunately, this was not the only thing going on in this country and some
of the other things present a very different picture. Teenage births are
down. So are abortion rates. So are divorce rates, violent crimes and the
number of welfare recipients. Teenage suicides, which had been rising
steadily for 20 years, is now dropping. Teenage drinking in 1995 was less
than half of what it was 20 years earlier.

The amount of time that children spending watching television is lower now.
Poverty among blacks has gone down. The marriage rate has had a recent
upturn, after years of declining.

These trends are all plotted in the January/February issue of "The American
Enterprise" magazine, published by the American Enterprise Institute in
Washington. Such trends offer a much-needed ray of hope at a time when it
would be all too easy to give up in despair.

We haven't gotten back to where we once were, before the corrosive ideas
and reckless practices that began in the 1960s created social disaster in
the midst of economic prosperity. Still, there are too many signs of a
turnaround to be just isolated coincidences.

The most important turnaround has been in people's minds. Most working
mothers today do not buy the "quality time" argument, as they did back in
1979. Most Americans today say that we are spending too much on welfare,
while most did not say that just a few years ago. Premarital sex is no
longer accepted among a majority of college freshmen, as it once was.

Internationally, the trends have swung around also. For the better part of
this century -- actually, the worst part of this century -- socialism of one
sort or another has been the goal of countries on every inhabited continent.
In Germany it was National Socialism for a dozen hellish years. Communism
was another form of socialism that grew to reign unchallenged from Central
Europe all the way across Asia to the Pacific Ocean.

Fabian socialism in postwar Britain and various kinds of socialism in newly
independent African nations, as well as socialism in India and in parts of
Latin America, helped complete the picture. In all these places, socialism
began with a bang and ended with a whimper.

In democratic Western nations, socialism led to runaway inflation or
soaring unemployment or both. In some African nations, there was an
absolute decline in national output, while population continued to grow.
Countries that used to export food began to experience hunger. In communist
countries, there were deaths in the millions from starvation and government
killings.

All this started turning around in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States were the
big names in this process, but even left-wing political parties in places
like New Zealand and France began moving toward privatization and the
market. Communist China moved toward the market after Mao's death -- and
then doubled and redoubled its income per capita as a result.

With so many signs of both degeneration and regeneration, how is it all
going to turn out? We don't know. We have never known. That battle has
never been won, once and for all. But now it is at least a contest in which
we have a fighting chance, economically and morally, as well as
politically.